I obtained my PhD in 1998 in Cultural History, titled ‘Put the Needle on the Record and Think of England: Notions of Englishness in the Post-war History of British Pop Music’. During my career, I have worked as researcher, university lecturer and professor in Cultural History at University of Turku since 1991. For the most of my career, I have been specialising in the study of popular music and culture in the context of cultural historyi. I have been especially interested in how the different notions of nationality and the politics could be seen through the prism of popular culture. Therefore, my forthcoming research will deal with the legacy of fascism and the fascination with it fascism in European popular music and culture. I have also worked as a researcher in the Academy of Finland project Starnet: The Changing Discourses of Popular Music Stardom (2005–2008). From 2014 to 2017, I was the leader of the research project Thatcherism, Popular Culture and the 1980s(funded by the Kone Foundation, Finland). Since 2013, I have also been working as Vice Director of IIPC (International Institute for Popular Culture) at the University of Turku and since 2015, as President of EPCA (European Popular Culture Association).